GA-SEN 2020 Class II Megathread (Perdue inc.)

[Adam Griffin]

I really would prefer an Abrams rematch for Governor as opposed to this.

Anyway, Perdue's appeal is that he is basically Generic R. Of course he won't do as well as he did in 2014 in the metro (even Isakson's 2016 performance in some metro areas - despite winning statewide by 14 - should have been worrisome for the GAGOP), but he'll have to try to do worse than Kemp.

The conversation about how Abrams' post-election actions might hurt her with voters isn't concerning because it'd take Democrats or even long-term independents off the table for her, but rather, because the types who would be "offended" by that are the same people who voted Perdue/Deal/Isakson/Abrams. And GA's electorate is not exactly very likely to change much over the next year and a half - the midterm was basically a presidential (with ~95% of the 2016 turnout); a betting man would bank on the 2020 electorate along demographic lines looking very, very similar to 2018's.

Anyway, I think running a repeat election in GA against a far less offensive incumbent (who obviously has supporters who voted for you as well) two years out, in a more naturally polarized environment and under the same demographics (which means you're required to win many of those same former Republicans once again, who also have voted for your opponent) isn't the best idea and starts you off in a naturally worse position than in 2018.

[Adam Griffin]

Crossposting this from the REAL GEORGIA MEGATHREAD:

A few days ago, I inexplicably began receiving emails/newsletters from Teresa Tomlinson (I'm a county party chair, so getting unsolicited political emails isn't necessarily new or surprising). I just opened my inbox this morning and in it was this.

She's running next year, and it looks like she's not concerned about what Abrams is planning to do (either that, or Abrams has already dropped from Senate and told Tomlinson privately):

[Adam Griffin]

I really don't think the calculus regarding difficulty or feasibility of Democrats winning this seat changes all that much, but I know many do not agree with me. Both Abrams and Perdue (in 2014) won a less-than-meaningless chunk of the same voters, but I think her choosing to focus on 2022-GOV is probably the best bet for both her personal ambition and that of the party's - rightfully or otherwise, she managed to polarize an already polarized state (despite 2.5x the turnout of the runoff, Abrams lost by the same # of raw votes as Barrow/Miller, meaning she turned out 1 voter to oppose her for every 1 voter she turned out to support her), and a repeat election right after her previous one would not lead to a more favorable outcome in my view; how often has the opposite been true?

Perdue will be hard to beat, but if so many on Atlas are right about "muh inevitable suburbron shifts", then it's really not going to matter who is running for Senate so long as they're competent, right?

Tomlinson is who I'm betting on for now.

[Adam Griffin]

So much I might say if I were somebody else, but I'm not, so I won't!

[Adam Griffin]

Why has the recruiting for these two seats suck so much?

I have a theory.

There's a certain level of difficulty/handicaps to factor in that is possibly causing this.

While having a ton of candidates in one race means that your chances of winning the nomination are much lower in that race (assuming they're credible ones), there is no nomination to be had in the other race. Isakson's race will be akin to the LA jungle primary: any and all candidates will appear on the same ballot, with the runoff occurring in January.

The odds of at least 1 or 2 rando Dems jumping in and siphoning off like 0.5-1% each is high (and at least with the former, practically guaranteed; the Ossoff race is probably the best recent example in GA, as is the 2019 LA jungle primary in general). It's very unlikely that there will end up being just 1 Democrat on the ballot for the Isakson jungle primary, even if Lieberman dropped out and one of the credible challengers from the Perdue race jumped ship to this one. It gets exponentially more difficult to win a race in GA as a Democrat with each percentage point you siphon off to either a fellow Democrat or independent in these jungle primary/runoff situations, for obvious reasons (50% +1).

So while in theory it might be nominally harder to knock off Perdue as an incumbent when compared to running in an open race, there's also the fact that you have no way to nail down your party's total endorsement or nomination in said open race - and you'll likely be running against a few random Democrats (and/or independents) who siphon off a few points. That virtually guarantees no outcome other than a runoff, which we would almost certainly lose.

If you want a Senate seat in GA as a Democrat, then you need to win on Election Night in November. I believe there's a better chance of that happening in the Perdue race, and that this is why everybody is clustering to challenge Perdue.

[Adam Griffin]

Why has the recruiting for these two seats suck so much?

I have a theory.

There's a certain level of difficulty/handicaps to factor in that is possibly causing this.

While having a ton of candidates in one race means that your chances of winning the nomination are much lower in that race (assuming they're credible ones), there is no nomination to be had in the other race. Isakson's race will be akin to the LA jungle primary: any and all candidates will appear on the same ballot, with the runoff occurring in January.

The odds of at least 1 or 2 rando Dems jumping in and siphoning off like 0.5-1% each is high (and at least with the former, practically guaranteed; the Ossoff race is probably the best recent example in GA, as is the 2019 LA jungle primary in general). It's very unlikely that there will end up being just 1 Democrat on the ballot for the Isakson jungle primary, even if Lieberman dropped out and one of the credible challengers from the Perdue race jumped ship to this one. It gets exponentially more difficult to win a race in GA as a Democrat with each percentage point you siphon off to either a fellow Democrat or independent in these jungle primary/runoff situations, for obvious reasons (50% +1).

So while in theory it might be nominally harder to knock off Perdue as an incumbent when compared to running in an open race, there's also the fact that you have no way to nail down your party's total endorsement or nomination in said open race - and you'll likely be running against a few random Democrats (and/or independents) who siphon off a few points. That virtually guarantees no outcome other than a runoff, which we would almost certainly lose.

If you want a Senate seat in GA as a Democrat, then you need to win on Election Night in November. I believe there's a better chance of that happening in the Perdue race, and that this is why everybody is clustering to challenge Perdue.

That explains the special election, but doesn't explain the terrible recruiting in the Perdue race when the question was about both the special and the Perdue race.

For the other seat, it's pretty simple: there is no tangible bench in Georgia. Virtually every elected Democrat - from city council to State Senate to US House - represents an area that is utterly noncompetitive in general elections. The vast, vast majority of elected Democrats in Georgia represent districts and jurisdictions that are >60% Democratic; the majority represent areas that are >75-80% Democratic. Barring the occasional and random out-county Dixiecrat who's been in office for 20+ years, there is nobody who knows how to win an actually competitive D v R general election in office - and this lack of experience shows in real campaigns.

[Adam Griffin]

Perdue will win 55-44.

Only way Perdue wins by 10 is if Trump wins GA by 7-8. Barring major scandals (I don't think insider trading qualifies in GA, frankly) he won't outperform Trump by more than 2-3 points.

[Adam Griffin]

Perdue will win 55-44.

Only way Perdue wins by 10 is if Trump wins GA by 7-8. Barring major scandals (I don't think insider trading qualifies in GA, frankly) he won't outperform Trump by more than 2-3 points.

On the flip side, do you buy into the "Georgia is a tossup in 2020" narrative?

Tossup, no. Competitive, yes. I'll call it Lean R - meaning that I expect Trump to win the state, but would not be surprised if Biden takes it as part of a significant overall win.

One thing I am curious about is how he does in rural areas compared to Abrams-- she did significantly worse than even Hillary did in rural areas. Can Biden do a bit better here, or are the trends too strong? If he can, that could make a big difference in a close race.

Margin-wise, Biden will in all likelihood do worse than Clinton in several dozen counties. This will be due primarily to a loss of (black) population, but trends will play a minor role as well. Of course, all of these counties combined probably won't be more than 10-15% of the state's vote, and quite a number of them will only be tiny swings.

I don't see Biden doing worse than Clinton in as many places as Clinton did worse than Obama (or Abrams worse than Carter). Setting aside the counties where we are losing both population and a disproportionate number of Democratic voters, there is a hard mathematical floor in many places we're now hitting. There's still varying amounts of room for loss in many counties, but in over a third of GA's counties, we had white voters in 2018 voting GOP at higher percentages than black voters voting Democratic.

To Abrams' credit, while it's true she did consistently worse than Clinton in the vast majority of counties, it was only by 1-2 points in most places. You could argue that a favorable Democratic midterm makes that quite embarrassing, but you can also argue that an inelastic state where strong trends of polarization have been raging mitigated any bounce in rural areas. If you want to criticize Abrams performance in rural GA, it'd be much better to compare her performance to Carter's in 2014 than Clinton's in 2016. Abrams lost 3 points in the statewide margin from the counties where she did worse than Carter; enough to cost her the Governorship and mirror-reverse the actual result (50.2% Abrams, 48.8% Kemp).

[Adam Griffin]

The reason I personally am hesitant to make that comparison is because Carter's performance in those areas was simply unattainable. Perhaps it was due to the Carter name, but regardless, there was never a chance that Abrams would be able to keep Kemp under 70% in most of Southwest Georgia like Carter did. One comparison that might be more interesting, although also outdated, would be 2012 President -> 2018 Governor.

But SW GA is like...nothing. Take everything west of I-75 and south of the Fall Line and you're talking about 6% of population (probably more like 5% of voters). Even when considering 2014/18 performance, Abrams didn't implode that badly there among white voters (the only apt comparison, given black population there was & is evaporating; can't win what doesn't exist): it was basically everywhere else in rural GA where she truly bombed in raw votes (SE GA, North GA, etc). Those places weren't inherently "loyal" to Carter because of his name in the way that a place like SW GA would've been.

Obviously her holding all of Carter's performance in these places wasn't possible - it's an illustration of how these places can still rat-f[inks]k Democrats despite so many in the party saying for the past 15 years that we've finally reached the bottom after every single election. It was a three-pronged set of losses with regard to her candidacy (in comparison to Carter's) in rural areas: one because of trends (unavoidable), one because she was a black woman (unavoidable in her personal circumstance, but not unavoidable for Democrats in general) and one because she went out of her way to talk about guns, Confederate monuments and other cultural claptrap that didn't motivate a single person to show up for her, but surely turned some likely voters against her (while galvanizing GOP turnout to boot).

[Adam Griffin]

This was the right move. Now she needs to work on analyzing and correcting what went wrong to prep for Gov/Lt Gov/SoS in 2022.

Out of curiosity, what do you think went wrong for her? I think a lot of her problems were beyond her control.

This, essentially. The moment Ossoff entered (and to a lesser degree, Amico), it was over in retrospect. People forget that Georgia is a name recognition state. Democrats in particular are going to vote en masse for the name they recognize (and when that isn't a factor, boy, do you get some stupid outcomes). Her fundraising was lackluster but didn't cost her the race (need I point out the Stacey Evans of the world who outraised their opponents and still lost); mainly it just led to the first swipe that allowed for an anti-momentum narrative to take hold.

See the current outcome map? It's a media market/name rec map, and nothing more:



Tomlinson won her home turf - i.e. the media market where she has had years of earned media exposure. While Ossoff was also well-known, she was the more trusted figure here obviously.

Amico won on the outskirts of Georgia in FL media markets because she was the only candidate to ever be on the ballot there, and neither of the other campaigns put any energy into these markets. By the way, this pattern of border counties in South GA has appeared in past primaries across both parties; neglect due to most people in those media markets being out-of-state. Similar but less absolute trends often occur in NW GA-Chatt media market: Ossoff was 25-35 there with Amico in 2nd, despite him winning majorities in every bordering ATL media market county.

Ossoff prevailed everywhere else due to his name rec and strength in the main media market.

[Adam Griffin]

Has anyone ever gotten a picture of, or proven the existence of Patricia McCracken yet?

https://www.blogfordemocracy.org/2010/07/mystery-galrevealed.html

[Adam Griffin]

With all but 3 Precincts left to report according to the GA SoS Office Senator David Perdue has 43K more Votes than Trump.

Perdue: 958,560

Trump: 934,773

I'd say right now that Perdue is in better shap in his own Reelection Race compared to Trumps Quest to hang on to GA 15 Electoral Votes.

For the record/final numbers:

Trump   1033313
Perdue   992555

I wouldn't read much into these, as the drop-off - while a tad high - is for a primary and therefore more prone to volatility & protest-(non)voting.

[Adam Griffin]

They should have just went all-out on Schumer and then tried to claim it was a face mask.

Also, does anybody else find it amusing that even the GOP now loves "the Obama font" (Gotham Black family) these days?

[Adam Griffin]

There's always a write-in space for every contest in GA, regardless of who is contesting it or if there are any valid write-in candidates. I always take the extra time to write-in "Democrat" in protest for every uncontested race.